Architect Bing Thom always gives good quote – and Michael McCarthy passes on a few choice observations in the recent Vancouver Courier piece: Beyond Vancouverism.
“The world is moving very fast these days,” says Thom. “Vancouver is like a teenager, just approaching maturity. We are a beautiful city, very narcissistic. We have a beautiful face but we need to grow up, and we have to choose what direction we want to go.”
But the article is way more than a profile of Thom. Past Vancouver city planner Ray Spaxman makes an important observation about the roots of Vancouverism:
Vancouverism, says Spaxman, grew out of a progressive period in Vancouver’s civic history. “I see Vancouverism not as an individual building or style, but as a work by a group of people in the 1970s, [at] a moment in time when the community elected a city council whose mission it was to improve the quality of life in our city. I refer to TEAM, or The Electors Action Movement, led by Art Phillips.”
Spaxman is quite right. And the SFU City Program will be exploring that theme in the first “Paradise Makers” session on Friday, September 5 at Harbour Centre. Details here.
Both Thom and Spaxman are concerned that Vancouver is becoming “nothing more than a big tourist destination.” That’s not a concern I share, and McCarthy gives me a few column inches in response:
“It’s not correct to say that Vancouver is becoming nothing more than a tourist town. First and foremost, the city is a major port. … Perhaps the rail lines that terminate at the waterfront will prove to be a very important part of our infrastructure in the future just as they have in the past, and we should think twice about any talk of their removal for the sake of more residential and commercial development.”
McCarthy also writes that I’m in favour of spreading the PoTo (podium-and-tower) prototype that marks the signature style of Vancouverism to the rest of the available land near the centre. Not so. I think the medium-rise style of Southeast False Creek was the right move – and we need a more serendipitous mixed-use model for lands further east. But in fact the PoTo style is being adopted all along the rapid-transit lines, present and future – and seems to be working well.
Central Vancouver now shares more than ever the ‘walkable urban’ environments popping up all over the region, from the City of North Van to White Rock.
Vancouverism in Burnaby
We may be surrounded by the “drivable surburban” sprawl that dominated urban design after World War II, but I share with James Kunstler the view that this form has no real future. It’s simply too energy intensive and unable to adapt quickly to the scale of change – economic, environmental, political – coming at us. That of course is the tragedy of Gateway: a 1960s-build out of an auto-dominant transportation strategy way past its time.
But as Dan Burden notes in his op-ed in the Vancouver Sun:
Vancouver now outpaces all other cities in North America for eight years of achieving reduced per-capita driving. There is always room for improvement, of course, but Vancouver has made itself the model for the future sustainability of all North American cities.
If that’s the legacy of Vancouverism, then, despite Bing’s assertion that we need to choose the direction we want to go, we already have – and it’s the right one.
